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Vanilla Sugar
Required, vanilla pods, and about four or five times their weight in sugar. The pods must be dried, then split and divided into small pieces and pounded, then, pounded again with the sugar. This wants very careful sifting to ensure its being uniformly fine.
A simple flavoured sugar, but the ratio and the sifting are the whole of it. A food processor replaces the mortar entirely.
- The ratioFour to five parts sugar by weight to one part dried vanilla pod. Two average pods weigh roughly 6 g, so about 25-30 g of sugar per pair — a small, intense batch meant for scenting custards and creams, not for sweetening tea.
- Dry the pods firstDamp pods gum up rather than powder. The recipe does not say how to dry them; a tray in the coolest possible oven until brittle, then cooled completely before grinding, is one modern way. Spent pods rinsed and dried after infusing milk can be used, though they give a noticeably weaker result.
- Use a machineA spice grinder or small food processor does in a minute what pounding does in twenty. Grind the pod pieces alone to a coarse dust first, then add the sugar and run again; adding sugar too early cushions the blades.
- The sifting is the pointVanilla pod contains tough fibre that never fully powders. Pass the mixture through a fine sieve and return the coarse residue to the grinder; repeat until only a few threads remain, which are discarded. Unsifted vanilla sugar leaves black splinters in a finished cream.
- Sugar to useOrdinary granulated or caster sugar. Caster grinds finer and sifts more readily. Icing sugar is best avoided, as it is already cut with an anti-caking starch or mineral and cannot be sifted usefully.
- StorageAirtight, in a jar, in the dark. The volatile aromatics fade with air and light, so it is best used while fresh, though it stays usable long after.
- The alternative methodBurying whole pods in a jar of sugar for a fortnight is the other traditional approach and gives a milder, cleaner scent. Cassell's pounded version is far stronger because the whole pod, seeds and all, ends up in the mix.
Vanilla reached European kitchens through Spanish contact with Mesoamerica, where the cured pods of Vanilla planifolia were used with cacao long before they were used with sugar; for most of the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries the vine was cultivated commercially only in Mexico, because the flower's specific pollinator did not travel with it. Hand-pollination, developed in the 1830s and 1840s, opened production to Réunion, Madagascar and elsewhere and increased supply, though vanilla remained a costly ingredient in Victorian Britain. It appears among the foundational preparations because a Victorian kitchen expected to make its own flavourings: bottled vanilla extract existed but was regarded with some suspicion, adulteration with coumarin from tonka bean being a complaint of the period.